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Post by dinosauria101 on Oct 26, 2023 7:51:29 GMT 5
I said this on Discord but I'll say it again here for members not on there. The Sinraptor and Anchiornis segment in E6 had a missed opportunity with its sauropods. I get that it was supposed to be about how dinosaurs evolved into birds, but they glanced briefly over sauropods before they went to Anchiornis and Sinraptor and literally nothing else. They even made their own CGI sauropods, so why not go in at least a little more?
Funny, that segment has me realizing just how much more giant sauropod palaeodocumentary fun I want. It seems like most times giant sauropods are in a palaeodocumentary, except for PP Alamosaurus and Mongolian sauropods, there is fun to be had in one way or another (like WWD Time of the Titans, CBD Land of Giants, PD New Giants, etc) related to the size of the sauropods.
LOOP in particular jogs my memory of finding in 2020 multiple news articles reporting a couple specimens of Patagotitan/Argentinosaurus sized mamenchisaurids in Jurassic China when I was interested in palaeontology beyond the documentaries. So LOOP certainly had precedent, and they could have had an updated version of the Jurassic China sauropod fun a certain whacky 2011 palaeodocumentary had.
Might seem like an odd complaint but a one missed opportunity with their models jogged my memory and had me realize how fun sauropod palaeodocumentaries are. |
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Post by Exalt on Oct 26, 2023 7:52:44 GMT 5
Ep2 comments:
> The Anomalocaris is certainly more accurate, but somehow looks less convincing (effects-wise) than the WWM-version imo
> I am fairly disappointed that we get to see so few Cambrian animals. Trilobites and Anomalocaris, and that’s supposed to be it? No Opabinia? No Hallucigenia? No Wiwaxia? No worms, no other stem-arthropods, no basal chordates? Nothing? That is quite a missed opportunity, they could have done a lot more with that segment.
> Orthocerids are mostly shown as being vertically oriented, which is nice. However they also show one free-swimming in a horizontal orientation at one point, which is less nice
> Cameroceras should more properly be called Endoceras, something the original WWM did right, though it was apparently done wrong in the background to Sea Monsters (although the actual genus name was never actually mentioned on screen, it always being referred to simply as an "orthocone"
> Arandaspis is portrayed as a sort of ancestor to all vertebrates here, which is ridiculous. Pteraspidomorphs of course represent a basal side branch in the evolution of gnathostomes, and are by no means direct ancestors of any extant clade. It’s a bit sad that we seem to have not advanced one bit with regard to accurately describing phylogeny since Walking with Monsters aired, which already had the same problem of seemingly not trusting its audiences to understand the differences between ancestors and sister taxa. If anything, this would be a really valuable point to address in a documentary at some point, and I honestly don’t believe it’s too complex for a general audience to grasp. If you’re worried, just show us a freakin’ cladogram, pretty sure that could be done in a similarly simplistic style to the timeline without breaking the immersion (and might indeed enhance the narrative, as it would give the audience a visually intuitive understanding of how the different animals they are shown are related).
> Dunkleosteus is claimed to be 9 m long, which is quite oversized. On the plus-side, the model they are showing actually looks pretty accurate, with appropriately stocky proportions, and they also don’t really show it interacting with much except a few ammonoids, so nothing in the actual scene is actually affected by it being oversized by a factor of 2.
> Sharks are claimed to have evolved over 400 Ma ago. Would it be too much to ask for a single documentary to not purport this "all paleozoic chondrichthyans are automatically sharks"-myth? Crown-group elasmobranchs don’t even appear in the fossil record until the Mesozoic for crying out loud!
> In the end of the episode, after explaining that the end-Devonian mass extinction happened (they are sort of omitting the rather relevant point that there were actually two mass extinctions) and correctly noting that it wiped out placoderms (which were succeeded by the "dynasty" of what they call "sharks", and what I would call "stem-chondrichthyans and holocephalans"), they give a sort of preview of the next episode, showing us a terrestrial forest implied to be a Devonian one. Problem is, it is very visibly just a modern forest. Nothing about it screams "Devonian", even though most of the plants in a late Devonian forest should look quite distinct from modern trees. If they didn’t want to go through the trouble of creating an authentic Devonian forest just for this scene, fine (though in light of the next episode, it sure would have been worth it), but the presentation seems a bit disingenuous.
Overall verdict:
I found myself quite liking the whole "dynasties" narrative, which is definitely compelling, albeit a little sensationalist and oversimplified at times. I also quite liked the way they blend modern-day footage and extinct ecosystems, but they could stand to give a bit more focus to the latter, considering they are supposed to be this documentary’s main selling point. In fact so far this is mainly an extant nature doc with some evolutionary narrative and a few scenes with extinct animals strewn in. I quite like the execution so far in terms of the style, it makes for quite an enjoyable watch, but if I had only seen the trailer, I’d be quite disappointed now.
PS: Like Supercommunist, I was also very pleasantly surprised to see the brief Erythrosuchus appearance in the last episode. That’s an animal I’ve always wanted to see portrayed, yet somehow never had overly high hopes of actually getting to see. This does make me curious for the next few episodes.
Provisional non-spoiler review: I’d have to agree with the "meh"-verdict so far. On the one hand, it is nice to watch, has stunning visuals (although I think the animation lacks a bit behind that of Prehistoric Planet, it is still top notch compared to pretty much everything else, plus the extant animal footage is truly stunning as well). But there are also some issues I have with it, some accuracy-wise, others pertaining to stylistic and narrative choices and the format of the show, and some a mixture of both. It is definitely a lot better than the vast majority of paleo-themed documentaries out there, and certainly worth watching, but it also isn’t what we initially hoped it would be. Can you really blame them for the Dunkleosteus size when that paper was earlier this year?
I guess I was right to be skeptical of the Arandaspis claim. A direct claim like that is not one I'd be inclined to stick out my neck for.
I only learned about the shark longevity being not entirely true thing rather recently, so I don't even know how to evaluate it.
I like the show fairly well outside of some of the issues, I think the pacing of this episode was a bit wonky. I might give more of my own thoughts later. |
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Post by Infinity Blade on Oct 26, 2023 16:45:53 GMT 5
I am skipping through some footage to see if its worth sitting down and watching the whole thing. Good news: There is an Erythrosuchus. Bad news: Lystro slander. The notion that lystros are these totally oblivious animals that were decimated by giant predators that apparently just popped into existence is ridiculous. Erythrosuchus would have had smaller ancestors and one would assume that they would have hunted and ingrained a fear response in in its descendent's prey. It’s also worth pointing out that there were still predators during Lystrosaurus’ “dominance period”. They obviously weren’t as diverse as they were right before the Permian extinction, and in at least some cases they weren’t even as big. But then again, Lystrosaurus was reduced in size during the Triassic too. In the earliest Triassic there would still have been akidognathid therocephalians and proterosuchids around to prey on Lystrosaurus. So it definitely wasn’t predator-naïve. All it would need to do against predators (old or newly-evolved) is hide in its burrows; that may have helped it survive the Permian extinction, after all.
I don’t think it’s impossible that competition with say, newly-evolving herbivores may have at least partially contributed to Lystrosaurus’ extinction, so I guess LOOP could’ve depicted that instead (although, no one’s ever studied this question in detail tmk). But predators? Yeah, definitely not. |
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Post by theropod on Oct 26, 2023 18:29:53 GMT 5
Ep2 comments:
> The Anomalocaris is certainly more accurate, but somehow looks less convincing (effects-wise) than the WWM-version imo
> I am fairly disappointed that we get to see so few Cambrian animals. Trilobites and Anomalocaris, and that’s supposed to be it? No Opabinia? No Hallucigenia? No Wiwaxia? No worms, no other stem-arthropods, no basal chordates? Nothing? That is quite a missed opportunity, they could have done a lot more with that segment.
> Orthocerids are mostly shown as being vertically oriented, which is nice. However they also show one free-swimming in a horizontal orientation at one point, which is less nice
> Cameroceras should more properly be called Endoceras, something the original WWM did right, though it was apparently done wrong in the background to Sea Monsters (although the actual genus name was never actually mentioned on screen, it always being referred to simply as an "orthocone"
> Arandaspis is portrayed as a sort of ancestor to all vertebrates here, which is ridiculous. Pteraspidomorphs of course represent a basal side branch in the evolution of gnathostomes, and are by no means direct ancestors of any extant clade. It’s a bit sad that we seem to have not advanced one bit with regard to accurately describing phylogeny since Walking with Monsters aired, which already had the same problem of seemingly not trusting its audiences to understand the differences between ancestors and sister taxa. If anything, this would be a really valuable point to address in a documentary at some point, and I honestly don’t believe it’s too complex for a general audience to grasp. If you’re worried, just show us a freakin’ cladogram, pretty sure that could be done in a similarly simplistic style to the timeline without breaking the immersion (and might indeed enhance the narrative, as it would give the audience a visually intuitive understanding of how the different animals they are shown are related).
> Dunkleosteus is claimed to be 9 m long, which is quite oversized. On the plus-side, the model they are showing actually looks pretty accurate, with appropriately stocky proportions, and they also don’t really show it interacting with much except a few ammonoids, so nothing in the actual scene is actually affected by it being oversized by a factor of 2.
> Sharks are claimed to have evolved over 400 Ma ago. Would it be too much to ask for a single documentary to not purport this "all paleozoic chondrichthyans are automatically sharks"-myth? Crown-group elasmobranchs don’t even appear in the fossil record until the Mesozoic for crying out loud!
> In the end of the episode, after explaining that the end-Devonian mass extinction happened (they are sort of omitting the rather relevant point that there were actually two mass extinctions) and correctly noting that it wiped out placoderms (which were succeeded by the "dynasty" of what they call "sharks", and what I would call "stem-chondrichthyans and holocephalans"), they give a sort of preview of the next episode, showing us a terrestrial forest implied to be a Devonian one. Problem is, it is very visibly just a modern forest. Nothing about it screams "Devonian", even though most of the plants in a late Devonian forest should look quite distinct from modern trees. If they didn’t want to go through the trouble of creating an authentic Devonian forest just for this scene, fine (though in light of the next episode, it sure would have been worth it), but the presentation seems a bit disingenuous.
Overall verdict:
I found myself quite liking the whole "dynasties" narrative, which is definitely compelling, albeit a little sensationalist and oversimplified at times. I also quite liked the way they blend modern-day footage and extinct ecosystems, but they could stand to give a bit more focus to the latter, considering they are supposed to be this documentary’s main selling point. In fact so far this is mainly an extant nature doc with some evolutionary narrative and a few scenes with extinct animals strewn in. I quite like the execution so far in terms of the style, it makes for quite an enjoyable watch, but if I had only seen the trailer, I’d be quite disappointed now.
PS: Like Supercommunist, I was also very pleasantly surprised to see the brief Erythrosuchus appearance in the last episode. That’s an animal I’ve always wanted to see portrayed, yet somehow never had overly high hopes of actually getting to see. This does make me curious for the next few episodes.
Provisional non-spoiler review: I’d have to agree with the "meh"-verdict so far. On the one hand, it is nice to watch, has stunning visuals (although I think the animation lacks a bit behind that of Prehistoric Planet, it is still top notch compared to pretty much everything else, plus the extant animal footage is truly stunning as well). But there are also some issues I have with it, some accuracy-wise, others pertaining to stylistic and narrative choices and the format of the show, and some a mixture of both. It is definitely a lot better than the vast majority of paleo-themed documentaries out there, and certainly worth watching, but it also isn’t what we initially hoped it would be. Can you really blame them for the Dunkleosteus size when that paper was earlier this year?
I guess I was right to be skeptical of the Arandaspis claim. A direct claim like that is not one I'd be inclined to stick out my neck for.
I only learned about the shark longevity being not entirely true thing rather recently, so I don't even know how to evaluate it.
I like the show fairly well outside of some of the issues, I think the pacing of this episode was a bit wonky. I might give more of my own thoughts later. Well, true, the substantial downsize in the published literature is rather recent, however they could and should have known even before that that a Dunkleosteus with that built is not going to be 9 m long.
A very simple reality check, scaling their model to 9 m and comparing it to the largest actual, known Dunkleosteus fossils, would have shown them that their Dunkleosteus would be way oversized relative to the fossil material if scaled to that size. I realize though that this kind of plausibility testing is something that just doesn’t seem to cross many people’s minds, both with regard to documentaries and elsewhere.
That being said, I don’t necessarily fault them for that, it was just an observation (there are other inaccuracies that I found a lot more annoying than the size they claim this particular animal to have). As I wrote, it doesn’t really cause any problems for the segment, because they aren’t showing the Dunkleosteus next to other animals that would make it being oversized a factor in what’s shown, so it’s only a matter of the narration.
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Post by dinosauria101 on Oct 26, 2023 19:30:25 GMT 5
What do you mean by this theropod? Do you mean this could have been JP-ized by Spielberg wanting to take inspiration from his past productions with dinosaurs? |
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Post by Exalt on Oct 26, 2023 20:43:23 GMT 5
Can you really blame them for the Dunkleosteus size when that paper was earlier this year?
I guess I was right to be skeptical of the Arandaspis claim. A direct claim like that is not one I'd be inclined to stick out my neck for.
I only learned about the shark longevity being not entirely true thing rather recently, so I don't even know how to evaluate it.
I like the show fairly well outside of some of the issues, I think the pacing of this episode was a bit wonky. I might give more of my own thoughts later. Well, true, the substantial downsize in the published literature is rather recent, however they could and should have known even before that that a Dunkleosteus with that built is not going to be 9 m long.
A very simple reality check, scaling their model to 9 m and comparing it to the largest actual, known Dunkleosteus fossils, would have shown them that their Dunkleosteus would be way oversized relative to the fossil material if scaled to that size. I realize though that this kind of plausibility testing is something that just doesn’t seem to cross many people’s minds, both with regard to documentaries and elsewhere.
That being said, I don’t necessarily fault them for that, it was just an observation (there are other inaccuracies that I found a lot more annoying than the size they claim this particular animal to have). As I wrote, it doesn’t really cause any problems for the segment, because they aren’t showing the Dunkleosteus next to other animals that would make it being oversized a factor in what’s shown, so it’s only a matter of the narration.
I was actually kind of surprised at how much resistance the Ammonoid (and the trilobite) put up. Titanis getting screwed but invertebrates nearly getting away? |
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Post by dinosauria101 on Oct 26, 2023 21:41:35 GMT 5
I would be very surprised if the cave lions get the baby mammoth. Same, same. The baby mammoth is VERY well defended in the trailer: that prediction about the mammoth and lions is one of my most confident ones. In this regard I think it is a nice contrast from WWB that showed the cave lion as a serious risk for if the mother mammoth's guard dropped. Just watched the cave lion and the mammoth scene. My hunch that the baby would be safe turned out to be true. However, there were multiple red flags otherwise. -Adolescent mammoth strays from the herd during the confrontation. Unless adolescent elephants do this when confronted with lions, it seems unrealistic. -ONE cave lion - yes, not three, not two, but ONE - is able to bring down that mammoth with very very very minimal struggle. This puts to shame the case of the 2 Smilodon downing the terror bird with unrealistic ease and minimal struggle that Infinity Blade noted. -What's worse, that mammoth seems to die just as quick as the terror bird did when it was stabbed in the throat by the Smilodon. Except there are no sabers stabbed in its throat, the lions are simply trying to suffocate it which should take WAY longer than the very fast kill LOOP shows. -The adult mammoths could easily have gotten the lions off the adolescent before it suffocated to death. But they don't even bother despite initially wanting to chase off the lions. Still an entertaining scene (one of the ones I was most excited for from the trailer, and I have to give Freeman credit for the very well timed statement of the youngster never straying from the herd again once it is killed), but there most definitely were blips. |
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Post by Exalt on Oct 27, 2023 9:07:30 GMT 5
thoughts on ep 3
> they claim lignin cell walls are the major innovation that came after moss. I am not a paleobotanist, but it would seem to me that they skipped an essential step here, and went straight from mosses to woody plants, esp. trees. The major innovation to talk about here would more properly be called "vascular tissue" (as well as, secondarily, roots, branching axes, and later foliage), allowing plants to grow in height at all, before jumping straight to the lignin allowing the formation of proper woody tissues and even larger sizes. A shame, because I quite liked the way the plant segment started, but cutting it short like this gives off the vibe of them wanting to get it over and done with as quickly as possible in order to get back to the animals. Which is itself a shame, because it’s so unnecessary; addressing the evolution of very early vascular plants would have provided a perfect backdrop for showing us some of the absolute earliest terrestrial animals.
> Next we jump straight to the Carboniferous and Arthropleura. While it’s nice to have a segment set in Romer’s gap, I sure hope we will jump back from here again and look at the Devonian, and not just skip it. I am also rather disappointed we didn’t get so see any truly early terrestrial arthropods before being shown the flashy carboniferous ones. The Arthropleura itself looks great, though we already knew to expect that.
> "The fern forest is vast" feels like a bit of a misrepresentation of what Carboniferous forests are actually famous for, which is giant lycopsids, not ferns. I admit that finding a location to shoot a fern forest today is a lot easier than recreating a Lepidodendron forest, but Walking with Monsters did a better job here at showing us a forest actually typical for the Carboniferous. That being said this on its own isn’t a major issue, it’s not as if there were no ferns in the Carboniferous, and it’s also not as if all Carboniferous forests were the same. Just know that the forest shown is not at all the kind of floral assemblage the Carboniferous is known for.
> We sure don’t seem to be going back to the Devonian, because the next segment is the Late Carboniferous. In fact it looks like we are going to be introduced to tetrapod terrestrialization in the Carboniferous. Next to that, WWM had it’s vertebrate evolution take place in quite a timely fashion.
> It’s nice that they acknowledge how "others had done this step before them", showing us the Anthracosaurus eating the baby Rhizodus, but it would have made much more sense to not create a danger of making it look like "the age of Amphibians" began in the Carboniferous in the first place. For a whole episode entitled "Invaders of the Land", we sure aren’t shown a lot of the time period in which most of this "Invasion" took place, the Devonian, both in terms of plant and animal evolution. In terms of evolution, it’s one more situation where they would have imo benefited from showing a phylogenetic tree of some sort; Anthracosaurus is an embolomere, making it more closely related to you and me than to actual Amphibians (i.e. Lissamphibia).
> More worryingly, in this segment we are again shown a forest. It gets points for at least being a swamp forest, but it gets major point deductions for clearly being a Holocene one. Again, I get that it’s really hard to recreate these ecosystems accurately, but if WWM managed to do it, they sure could have tried a little harder than just showing us a modern Louisiana swamp and expecting it to suspend our disbelief about Carboniferous swamp forests sporting what clearly looks to be Taxodium instead of Lepidodendron.
> We’re then shown footage of a poison dart frog carrying its tadpoles on its back. I watched another nature doc just today that showed footage of what I’m pretty sure was the exact same species of poison dart frog doing exactly the same thing. Talk about coincidences. Nothing else in particular to say here, except that it was quite aptly utilized to demonstrate amphibians’ continued ties to water.
> I really like the Scutosaurus and Inostrancevia models shown here, probably my favourite ones so far. A shame we don’t get to enjoy them for very long though.
> "A Gorgonopsid". Are they seriously going the same route as WWM here and refusing to just give us a genus name for the Gorgonopsid that is clearly meant to be Inostrancevia? Come on! Why not at least do it to some other animal this time
> I can’t help noticing that the trees shown here are very clearly just modern-day pines. Pines may be old, but not that old. I get that it would have been hard to show us authentic Upper Permian Gymnosperms (that often had small, scale-like leaves, looking more similar to junipers or Araucaria than to pines, but they could have tried a little harder than just going to a totally ordinary pine forest. I am slowly beginning to see a bit of a pattern here with them showing us plant assemblages that may look vaguely ancient, but in fact have little to do with the ecosystems that are supposed to be representing. Hopefully this issue will be mitigated once we get to the Mesozoic.
> They do a nice job illustrating the apocalyptic dimensions of the siberian volcanic province, but I must confess that I’d have preferred seeing more animated animals rather than lava.
> For a moment when they went on about "toxic concoction of noxious gases", I was worried they were going to ignore the climate change issue here. Luckly this was an unfounded worry.
> Yay, at least they have Lystrosaurus actually doing the thing it is most famous for and surviving the P/T-event. More than can be said for WWM.
I must confess that I may have gotten spoiled in terms of accuracy by watching Prehistoric Planet for two years. Maybe my expectations have gotten too high; what’s certain is that this isn’t a LOOP-problem, and that no other documentary stands any chance of meeting them either. By any reasonable standard, LOOP is a lot better both accuracy- and presentation-wise than the vast majority of paleo-documentaries I have watched.
But I also feel it’s justified to have higher standards for a 2023 documentary than for a 1999 one. Documentaries should learn from previous ones, and we shouldn’t be moving backwards in terms of accuracy (though seeing how this one had Spielberg involved, it could have gone a lot worse). I must also acknowledge that these new accuracy standards are certainly a more ambitious goal to strive for in a series with a scope covering all of earth’s history, and all the complexities it brings with it, than for a show like PP that is entirely set in a single geological stage and has no complex evolutionary processes to explain. So I give points for having an ambitious goal, but succeeding at that goal would undoubtedly have been even better, and I think content-wise, they could have gone with a little more input from scientists here.
What I also have to say is that just being "better than most documentaries" was never really a point of contention, in fact I’d argue it was more or less a foregone conclusion. So I think the more pertinent question to evaluate here is rather whether LOOP is (as we had hoped) both a worthy successor to the Trilogy of Life, and a modern documentary upholding similar accuracy standards to Prehistoric Planet, which I know are impossibly high standards. At the moment I’d say it is a mixed bag. It is certainly very enjoyable to watch, and has quite a bit going for it educationally, but it also has its share of problems, and falls short of the shows it is being compared to in both regards, in my opinion. It neither has the long, uninterrupted stories entirely set in prehistory that WW had, nor does it quite live up to PP standards in terms of accuracy. Some of the information presented is also a bit misleading, deliberately confusing or omitting very important subject matter (like skipping the entire early terrestrialization of arthropods and vascular plants in the Devonian), and there is this irritating theme of showing us the wrong plant communities for the time they are supposed to be set in. This makes me question some of their decisions regarding the plot, as well as whether they paid proper attention to the experts when planning the show. Nonetheless, it is a redeeming quality that they still do a good job at still tying it all together into their greater overaching narrative, which I think is quite strong and appropriately epic.
First of all, I will say that I honestly did not notice the plants being wrong, because I am uninformed.
Your criticism of the plant story being truncated is by no means invalid, but I feel like it's a symptom of the overarching problem of LOOP trying to do too much with not enough time.
Them not going back to the Devonian is pretty weird considering that after we saw those poor dead fish, the narration stated that that was only half the story.
I kind of want to look in to those transitional animals now...
That Anthracosaurus relation thing is rather surprising to me. Putting that aside, the bait and switch would have been a lot more surprising had it not been in the trailer. That said, wouldn't you rather ACTUALLY depict one of the first vertebrates to venture onto land? Additionally, what was the big fish that tried to hunt the Rhizodus beforehand?
The Arthropleura scene felt weirdly cut short for one that was kind of advertised.
I kind of agree on that Great Dying statement: the Devonian extinction was the one that's gotten me the most as of episode 5 due to the Dunkleosteus and the beached fish.
I did catch that Lystrosaurus did appear before the boundary this time. And yeah, I'm starting to wonder if someone is allergic to calling it Inostrancevia.
I like that you're being even-handed and pointing out the good along with the bad.
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Post by theropod on Oct 27, 2023 16:44:22 GMT 5
(I think this can go outside of spoilers as I’m not really disclosing specific details of any episode, but if you absolutely don’t want to read any info on the show yet, maybe not read this)
So, I still haven’t watched the entire series (though I’ll comment on ep 4 soon, there’s quite a bit to unpack there), but I think I’ve seen enough to form a more solid opinion on the show overall.
LOOP is immensely ambitious in its storytelling, by setting out to do no less than what the Trilogy of Life did, all in a single documentary. So it should come as no surprise that it fell short of its ambitions, although I find it a bit disappointing that it did so in a rather predictable way (i.e. it could have tried harder imo).
My main issues with this show, as of now:
> Grossly oversimplified or plain inaccurate science, which is made subordinate to the narrative rather than the other way around
> Prehistoric ecosystems not fleshed out well and sometimes rather lazily recreated, with very limited diversity shown (often just two species interacting briefly before the next time-jump) and occasional glaring mistakes (such as the wrong flora shown)
> Some weird narrative choices in terms of which time periods and events are focused on and which ones are left out or glossed over, resulting in key events in the history of life
> Dishonest advertising, especially with regard to how much paleobiodiversity we are actually shown, and how much screentime it gets. Unfortunately I have to say that this show is definitely a lot closer to "Ice Age Giants" than I had hoped, with the lion’s share of the animated equences already being featured in the trailers. Leaving aside the problem that this just isn’t enough for a satisfactory rundown of the evolution of life, speaking from a pure entertainment perspective it is quite disappointing when a trailer already spoils almost every single scene (or in this case, the cgi scenes, anyway) so that there’s barely anything new to discover when actually watching the series. That’s just not what a trailer is supposed to be for, it should hint at the contents of a show, without spoiling its contents.
Let’s say that much unlike in the case of Prehistoric Planet, it is quite apparent that this series was not the brainchild of a scientist, but of a bunch of filmmakers. As a result, LOOP shows us a lot of individual animals that the producers must have (justifiably) thought were cool, but doesn’t really do them, their ecosystems, or their evolution justice.
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Post by dinosauria101 on Oct 27, 2023 18:28:23 GMT 5
> Dishonest advertising, especially with regard to how much paleobiodiversity we are actually shown, and how much screentime it gets. Unfortunately I have to say that this show is definitely a lot closer to "Ice Age Giants" than I had hoped, with the lion’s share of the animated equences already being featured in the trailers. Leaving aside the problem that this just isn’t enough for a satisfactory rundown of the evolution of life, speaking from a pure entertainment perspective it is quite disappointing when a trailer already spoils almost every single scene (or in this case, the cgi scenes, anyway) so that there’s barely anything new to discover when actually watching the series. That’s just not what a trailer is supposed to be for, it should hint at the contents of a show, without spoiling its contents. The rest of your comment will be commented on when I can think of the words to say for a comment. But now that I've finished LOOP (which you may or may not have seen from Discord, if you haven't then beware of the spoiler), I can give my existing full thoughts on this part, In my opinion, the dishonest advertising seemed to fall into 2 categories - which seem more or less analogous to the ones you mention, although we may not be 100% referring to the same things:
1) Getting close to a rerun of Ice Age Giants except Trilogy of Life-style. As much as I agree with you here I actually found it to be extremely variable from scene to scene.
I haven't done a full rewatch to compare and contrast the total of which CGI segments shown in the trailers were spoiled vs what CGI segments were appropriately advertised instead of spoiled (EDIT: It seems like this is in fact all of the ones that were advertised!), but my opinions on spoiling vs advertising are as follows - in no particular order.
-Pliosaur scene spoiled by the trailer.
-Smilodon and terror bird scene slightly spoiled by the trailer.
-Sinraptor and Anchiornis scene spoiled by the trailer.
-Megacerops scene appropriately advertised by the trailer.
-T. rex interaction scene spoiled by the trailer.
-T. rex and Triceratops scene kind of spoiled by the trailer, but not to the level of the others.
-Triceratops fire scene appropriately advertised by the trailer.
-Sea turtles and Pterodactylus scene appropriately advertised by the trailer.
-Dunkleosteus scene appropriately advertised by the trailer.
-Gorgonopsid and Scutosaurus scene kind of spoiled by the trailer, but not to the level of the others.
-Strepsodus and Anthracosaurus scene spoiled by the trailer.
-Cave lion and woolly mammoth scene appropriately advertised by the trailer.
-Smilodon and Doedicurus scene appropriately advertised by the trailer.
-Arthropleura scene could have been either, depending on what you watched. Trailers advertised it appropriately but they spoiled it with that executive clip (which I made the mistake of watching).
-Cameroceras scene appropriately advertised by the trailer.
-Allosaurus and Diplodocus scene appropriately advertised by the trailer.
-Deinonychus and Arkansaurus scene appropriately advertised by the trailer.
-Second terror bird scene appropriately advertised by the trailer.
-Lystrosaurus and Erythrosuchus scene appropriately advertised by the trailer.
-Maiasaura scene appropriately advertised by the trailer.
-Plateosaurus scene appropriately advertised by the trailer.
-Hatching bird egg scene appropriately advertised by the trailer.
-Edmontosaurus scene leans spoiled by the trailer - although they didn't show us much of it in the trailer, I feel like they shouldn't have put it in the trailer because showing us any of it beforehand would have made it obvious what was going to happen.
-Alamosaurus scene appropriately advertised by the trailer.
So in my opinion that's 9 spoils and 15 appropriately advertised segments. For all the variability between segments, and as much as my appropriately advertised segments outnumber my spoiled ones by over 50 percent, I'd have to concur that this is a lot closer to Ice Age Giants than I had hoped - especially considering it's literally over a third of the CGI segments spoiled.
Additionally, going beyond the discrepancies of simple spoiling vs appropriate advertising, they advertised too much of it in my opinion. I can't tell whether you are alluding to that or what happens in trailer segments beyond trailer clips with your statement of new things to discover when watching, but there are literally just half a dozen species of CGI animal they didn't trailer-advertise: Anomalocaris, Allosaurus, Quetzalcoatlus, Maiacetus, Otodus, and Theosodon.
And having read the non-trailer non-spoiler revealers available, most of those never came as a surprise for me - literally the only one that did was the Quetzalcoatlus, which had a cameo of like 2 seconds in the Triceratops fire scene.
While not dishonest in and of itself (it comes across more as overenthusiastic advertising in my opinion), to have literally only one surprise CGI animal to discover (that had like 2 seconds of screentime nonetheless) definitely sucked. I think they could have made the aspect of new animals for viewers to discover work a lot better advertising-wise had they replaced about half the CGI animal segments with the modern animal segments - which brings me to my next point.
2) Understating how much of the series wasn't going to be CGI. Unlike with the above this isn't exactly following in the footsteps of what Ice Age Giants did with their dishonest trailer (considering that trailer literally had no indication of anything that wasn't CGI animals), but LOOP's mostly CGI animal trailers fail to reflect that there seems to be at least as much - and maybe even more - modern animal footage/animal-free scenery footage than CGI animal footage.
I therefore do not consider it to be as dishonest as their above blunder because technically they did let us know that it was going to be a mix, and it was something I was prepared for. But in no way does it tell us how substantial the comparison and contrast between CGI animals and modern animals will be, nor the fact that all episodes no matter how ancient are going to have multiple modern animal clips, and nor the fact that that multiple of the animal-free scenes like the ice melt in North America or Permian volcanoes would last as long as they did.
Overall this seems like it would tie in to the observation you made about misleading us with regards to how much screentime the CGI animals get (on the other hand, if you were referring to the absolute amount of time they spend on screen and how satisfying that was, I have quite a few words about that but still have to think about how best to say them so stay tuned).
One thing I will say, though, is that they better be glad they made LOOP as long as they did because if it had been any real amount of time shorter with the resultant reduction in CGI animals, it would have worked out much poorer in my opinion. |
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Post by theropod on Oct 27, 2023 20:54:15 GMT 5
thoughts on ep 4:
> talking about the aftermath of the Permian extinction event is nice. But the "barren, and deathly silent" world they show also sort of perpetuates a myth that an extinction event happens in an instant; as if there was a day before the end-permian extinction, then the day the extinction happens, and we’re now on the day after. That’s not how this works. A way to show this more clearly would have been to talk about the prolonged aftermath of this extinction, such as the coral and coal gaps that lasted for millions of years, or the minor extinctions that happened within those millions of years as ripple-effects. Instead they very misleadingly portray the world as though everything just died all at once ("apocalyptic graveyard"), going so far as to claim that "fungi where the dominant lifeform on earth" for "a few thousand years" by feasing on all the dead. This is just stupid.
> "Lystrosaurus, an ancient ancestor of the mammal". Seriously? No! This is about as bad as it would be to say that Basilosaurus was an ancient ancestor of humans. I could have forgiven this had they said this about a cynodont, which at least would be a lot closer to actual mammal ancestors (mammals being a clade of cynodonts). But dicynodonts did not leave any descendants.
> To be fair, I quite like their Lystrosaurus model, and at least they got its dominance in the earliest Triassic right. They aren’t really threading new ground here.
> "Life in many forms found a way" – nice Jurassic Park reference here
> "For tens of millions of years the earth’s continents have been converging […] Pangaea […] drying that started in a previous era is now compounded by searing heat" — errr what? It appears like they are seriously telling us that Pangaea only formed by the Triassic period. And they appear to have forgotten what they told us in the previous episode about the runaway greenhouse effect that caused the P/T-extinction in the first place, by implying that the "searing heat" is a new phenomenon.
> Now we get the whole narrative about Lystrosaurus going extinct due to being unable to cope with any predation pressure. This has already been commented on, but that doesn’t make it any less stupid. "They have no defense against this new type of reptile, nor even awareness of the threat it poses"? It seriously feels a bit like this documentary tells us stuff in one episode, and then forgets about it and contradicts itself in the next. In the last episode, we literally saw Lystrosaurus surviving alongside large, formidable Gorgonopsid predators. Now we are suddenly expected to believe that not only did Erythrosuchus somehow come out of nowhere to the complete surprise of Lystrosaurus like some sort of invasive species in the extant world, but also that Lystrosaurus just plain lacks the ability to survive in an ecosystem where there are predators? Predators don’t just materialize out of nowhere to the complete surprise of everything else, and prey aren’t just totally naive to predators that must have naturally evolved alongside them. Honestly, this is one of the most inexcusable inaccuracies so far, since it demonstrates clearly the creators of this series don’t understand how evolution works.
> To name a positive, not only was I very pleasantly surprised to see Erythrosuchus (one of the few positive surprises I have had with this series so far), but I also really like the CG model of it. For that matter, I’d really have loved to see the lower Triassic fauna getting more screentime, including the Erythrosuchus, but sadly all we get to see is this one scene.
> Secondarily marine reptiles, this sounds nice. And this fits right in with the time we are in right now, there are so many amazing Early and Middle Triassic marine reptiles (one of the most interesting ever periods for marine reptiles, with a staggering taxonomic diversity and morphological disparity of early-branching Sauropterygians and ichthyoopterygians)…so it’s a bit of a shame we have to jump forward to the Late Jurassic (150 Ma) to be shown a generic 8 m Pliosaur (pliosaurs having been shown in documentaries with some regularity, albeit not as often as Mosasaurs) and have it chomp down on equally generic sea turtles, and then see those same turtles having their offspring eaten by fairly generic pterosaurs. It’s also confusing to the audience that we have this jumping back and forth in the otherwise fairly linear narrative. And it’s both totally unnecessary, it feels like another decision that actively hurts the narrative. Instead of being shown where marine reptiles and pterosaurs came from, how they first evolved and adapted to their respective environments back when their existence represented a major evolutionary milestone, we are only shown the "finished product" an entire period later. They are literally skipping the most interesting bits, deliberately making huge and unnecessary timejumps and leaving lots of interesting subject matter unexplored, just to show us something that is less interesting and less educational. In this way, ignoring the Triassic when it comes to aquatic and flying reptiles mirrors ignoring the Devonian when it comes to terrestrialization of plants and animals. Both are writing decisions that I can only describe as insane, honestly, so it’s worrying that this now occurs the second time within the space of two episodes.
> The pterosaurs, I suspect, are supposed to be Pterodactylus (not a single actual genus name is uttered in this segment, which is a little frustrating). The models look quite good, although I was at first a little confused because the teeth are so small that I overlooked them, making them appear quite azhdarchoid-like. However, what I do take a bit of an issue with is that even though Pterodactylus is quite a small pterosaur, the animation gives it the feel (in the way it moves) of being quite a large animal.
> Our next time jump is back in the Triassic, this time to the Carnian (we’re not given any mention or explanation of how we were already in the Jurassic in the last prehistoric segment, which I fear will make it even more confusing to audiences). We’re getting introduced to the Carnian pluvial event, and the major changes it meant for the global climate, which is nice. What would be even better would be seeing some actual Carnian animals, which unfortunately we do not.
> "conifers rose to the fore" sort of implies that they didn’t before, even though they showed a lot of conifers in the Permian and (very anachronistically) even the second one of their Carboniferous segments. In reality, conifers started dominating floras in the Permian (although permian confers still shouldn’t simply look like modern pines).
> The next segment is in the Norian (210 Ma) and we are shown Plateosaurus hatchlings, emerging from soft-shelled eggs. This part may be a little contentious; it’s been suggested that the ancestral condition of dinosaurs would have been thinly mineralized, but rigid eggshell (Stein et al. 2019), but the same study also implied that the reason we only find Amniote eggs from the Lower Jurassic and onwards may be related to low atmospheric oxygen levels causing these eggshells to stay thin (and thus, probably flexible and not extensively mineralized), so I don’t have a major issue here.
>The baby Plateosaurus look alright; they are clearly modelled on the known hatchlings of Massospondylus and Mussaurus in terms of proportions and locomotion, but, funnily, are shown transitioning to an unstable, bipedal posture when running. As I hinted at before, I am personally not so convinced hatchlings of Plateosaurus were actually quadrupedal, considering that the only juvenile has, if anything, porportionately shorter forelimbs than the adults, not longer ones the way seen in Massospondylus (which would mean for the hatchlings to be more quadrupedal, they would have to first decrease and then increase their relative forelimb length again during growth). But since there are no statistically significant data and no actual hatchlings proving this, the way it is depicted here is still plausible enough.
> The adult Plateosaurus model looks quite nice, and is easily the best animated portrayal the genus ever got, though there isn’t much competition in that regard (with non-sauropod sauropodomorphs having received very little attention in this regard so far, and the only other Plateosaurus being WWD’s very inaccurate quadrupedal one). It seems to have medially-facing palms, obligate bipedality, and correct proportions and head shape, which is nice.
> It’s nice that they mention the avian respiratory system that is characteristic of dinosaurs (although it is likely the ancestral condition at least on the level of Ornithodira, and thus not unique to dinosaurs). What is quite ridiculous though is how they just sort of make it look like dinosaurs were the only reptiles with erect limb posture, when this is quite a widespread feature among archosaurs.
> Next we skip to the Upper Jurassic again. This I must say is an extreme disappointment. So we are just ignoring the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event alltogether? We’re introduced to the "dynasty" of dinosaurs, which this series was quite adamant were extremely important, but not only are we not really shown the origins of this group (skipping right to megaherbivorus sauropodomorphs as the first dinosaurs we meet), or (in the usual style of this documentary) how they interacted with or prevailed over their competition, but we’re not even given a passing mention of one of the five greatest mass extinction events since the Cambrian, and the one that played a key role in shaping the rule of said "dynasty"? Once more, this is something that WWD, for all its inaccuracies, did a better job at conveying, by showing us the early dinosaurs as small faunivores (even if Coelophysis nowadays wouldn’t be considered the ideal choice to use as a representative for early dinosaurs, it does fulfill this role quite well), ruled over by large, predatory pseudosuchians, and sharing their environment with mammal-like cynodonts and megaherbivorous Kannemeyriids. Considering the professed mission of this series, I was hoping we’d get a more in-depth look at this kind of fauna and its extinction, but instead we got almost nothing, dinosaurs just appear and are instantly the new rulers.
Bottom line: somehow it feels as if this episode is really where things start to fall apart. Admittedly I was expecting that something like this would happen, and that I’d have more to criticize about the mesozoic than about the rest. But it does seem to me that it’s the issues growing larger, not just me becoming more critical. I’m definitely going to watch the remaining episodes too
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Stein, K., Prondvai, E., Huang, T., Baele, J.-M., Sander, P.M. and Reisz, R. 2019. Structure and evolutionary implications of the earliest (Sinemurian, Early Jurassic) dinosaur eggs and eggshells. Scientific Reports 9 (1): 4424.
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Post by Exalt on Oct 27, 2023 22:08:29 GMT 5
thoughts on ep 4:
> talking about the aftermath of the Permian extinction event is nice. But the "barren, and deathly silent" world they show also sort of perpetuates a myth that an extinction event happens in an instant; as if there was a day before the end-permian extinction, then the day the extinction happens, and we’re now on the day after. That’s not how this works. A way to show this more clearly would have been to talk about the prolonged aftermath of this extinction, such as the coral and coal gaps that lasted for millions of years, or the minor extinctions that happened within those millions of years as ripple-effects. Instead they very misleadingly portray the world as though everything just died all at once ("apocalyptic graveyard"), going so far as to claim that "fungi where the dominant lifeform on earth" for "a few thousand years" by feasing on all the dead. This is just stupid.
> "Lystrosaurus, an ancient ancestor of the mammal". Seriously? No! This is about as bad as it would be to say that Basilosaurus was an ancient ancestor of humans. I could have forgiven this had they said this about a cynodont, which at least would be a lot closer to actual mammal ancestors (mammals being a clade of cynodonts). But dicynodonts did not leave any descendants.
> To be fair, I quite like their Lystrosaurus model, and at least they got its dominance in the earliest Triassic right. They aren’t really threading new ground here.
> "Life in many forms found a way" – nice Jurassic Park reference here
> "For tens of millions of years the earth’s continents have been converging […] Pangaea […] drying that started in a previous era is now compounded by searing heat" — errr what? It appears like they are seriously telling us that Pangaea only formed by the Triassic period. And they appear to have forgotten what they told us in the previous episode about the runaway greenhouse effect that caused the P/T-extinction in the first place, by implying that the "searing heat" is a new phenomenon.
> Now we get the whole narrative about Lystrosaurus going extinct due to being unable to cope with any predation pressure. This has already been commented on, but that doesn’t make it any less stupid. "They have no defense against this new type of reptile, nor even awareness of the threat it poses"? It seriously feels a bit like this documentary tells us stuff in one episode, and then forgets about it and contradicts itself in the next. In the last episode, we literally saw Lystrosaurus surviving alongside large, formidable Gorgonopsid predators. Now we are suddenly expected to believe that not only did Erythrosuchus somehow come out of nowhere to the complete surprise of Lystrosaurus like some sort of invasive species in the extant world, but also that Lystrosaurus just plain lacks the ability to survive in an ecosystem where there are predators? Predators don’t just materialize out of nowhere to the complete surprise of everything else, and prey aren’t just totally naive to predators that must have naturally evolved alongside them. Honestly, this is one of the most inexcusable inaccuracies so far, since it demonstrates clearly the creators of this series don’t understand how evolution works.
> To name a positive, not only was I very pleasantly surprised to see Erythrosuchus (one of the few positive surprises I have had with this series so far), but I also really like the CG model of it. For that matter, I’d really have loved to see the lower Triassic fauna getting more screentime, including the Erythrosuchus, but sadly all we get to see is this one scene.
> Secondarily marine reptiles, this sounds nice. And this fits right in with the time we are in right now, there are so many amazing Early and Middle Triassic marine reptiles (one of the most interesting ever periods for marine reptiles, with a staggering taxonomic diversity and morphological disparity of early-branching Sauropterygians and ichthyoopterygians)…so it’s a bit of a shame we have to jump forward to the Late Jurassic (150 Ma) to be shown a generic 8 m Pliosaur (pliosaurs having been shown in documentaries with some regularity, albeit not as often as Mosasaurs) and have it chomp down on equally generic sea turtles, and then see those same turtles having their offspring eaten by fairly generic pterosaurs. It’s also confusing to the audience that we have this jumping back and forth in the otherwise fairly linear narrative. And it’s both totally unnecessary, it feels like another decision that actively hurts the narrative. Instead of being shown where marine reptiles and pterosaurs came from, how they first evolved and adapted to their respective environments back when their existence represented a major evolutionary milestone, we are only shown the "finished product" an entire period later. They are literally skipping the most interesting bits, deliberately making huge and unnecessary timejumps and leaving lots of interesting subject matter unexplored, just to show us something that is less interesting and less educational. In this way, ignoring the Triassic when it comes to aquatic and flying reptiles mirrors ignoring the Devonian when it comes to terrestrialization of plants and animals. Both are writing decisions that I can only describe as insane, honestly, so it’s worrying that this now occurs the second time within the space of two episodes.
> The pterosaurs, I suspect, are supposed to be Pterodactylus (not a single actual genus name is uttered in this segment, which is a little frustrating). The models look quite good, although I was at first a little confused because the teeth are so small that I overlooked them, making them appear quite azhdarchoid-like. However, what I do take a bit of an issue with is that even though Pterodactylus is quite a small pterosaur, the animation gives it the feel (in the way it moves) of being quite a large animal.
> Our next time jump is back in the Triassic, this time to the Carnian (we’re not given any mention or explanation of how we were already in the Jurassic in the last prehistoric segment, which I fear will make it even more confusing to audiences). We’re getting introduced to the Carnian pluvial event, and the major changes it meant for the global climate, which is nice. What would be even better would be seeing some actual Carnian animals, which unfortunately we do not.
> "conifers rose to the fore" sort of implies that they didn’t before, even though they showed a lot of conifers in the Permian and (very anachronistically) even the second one of their Carboniferous segments. In reality, conifers started dominating floras in the Permian (although permian confers still shouldn’t simply look like modern pines).
> The next segment is in the Norian (210 Ma) and we are shown Plateosaurus hatchlings, emerging from soft-shelled eggs. This part may be a little contentious; it’s been suggested that the ancestral condition of dinosaurs would have been thinly mineralized, but rigid eggshell (Stein et al. 2019), but the same study also implied that the reason we only find Amniote eggs from the Lower Jurassic and onwards may be related to low atmospheric oxygen levels causing these eggshells to stay thin (and thus, probably flexible and not extensively mineralized), so I don’t have a major issue here.
>The baby Plateosaurus look alright; they are clearly modelled on the known hatchlings of Massospondylus and Mussaurus in terms of proportions and locomotion, but, funnily, are shown transitioning to an unstable, bipedal posture when running. As I hinted at before, I am personally not so convinced hatchlings of Plateosaurus were actually quadrupedal, considering that the only juvenile has, if anything, porportionately shorter forelimbs than the adults, not longer ones the way seen in Massospondylus (which would mean for the hatchlings to be more quadrupedal, they would have to first decrease and then increase their relative forelimb length again during growth). But since there are no statistically significant data and no actual hatchlings proving this, the way it is depicted here is still plausible enough.
> The adult Plateosaurus model looks quite nice, and is easily the best animated portrayal the genus ever got, though there isn’t much competition in that regard (with non-sauropod sauropodomorphs having received very little attention in this regard so far, and the only other Plateosaurus being WWD’s very inaccurate quadrupedal one). It seems to have medially-facing palms, obligate bipedality, and correct proportions and head shape, which is nice.
> It’s nice that they mention the avian respiratory system that is characteristic of dinosaurs (although it is likely the ancestral condition at least on the level of Ornithodira, and thus not unique to dinosaurs). What is quite ridiculous though is how they just sort of make it look like dinosaurs were the only reptiles with erect limb posture, when this is quite a widespread feature among archosaurs.
> Next we skip to the Upper Jurassic again. This I must say is an extreme disappointment. So we are just ignoring the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event alltogether? We’re introduced to the "dynasty" of dinosaurs, which this series was quite adamant were extremely important, but not only are we not really shown the origins of this group (skipping right to megaherbivorus sauropodomorphs as the first dinosaurs we meet), or (in the usual style of this documentary) how they interacted with or prevailed over their competition, but we’re not even given a passing mention of one of the five greatest mass extinction events since the Cambrian, and the one that played a key role in shaping the rule of said "dynasty"? Once more, this is something that WWD, for all its inaccuracies, did a better job at conveying, by showing us the early dinosaurs as small faunivores (even if Coelophysis nowadays wouldn’t be considered the ideal choice to use as a representative for early dinosaurs, it does fulfill this role quite well), ruled over by large, predatory pseudosuchians, and sharing their environment with mammal-like cynodonts and megaherbivorous Kannemeyriids. Considering the professed mission of this series, I was hoping we’d get a more in-depth look at this kind of fauna and its extinction, but instead we got almost nothing, dinosaurs just appear and are instantly the new rulers.
Bottom line: somehow it feels as if this episode is really where things start to fall apart. Admittedly I was expecting that something like this would happen, and that I’d have more to criticize about the mesozoic than about the rest. But it does seem to me that it’s the issues growing larger, not just me becoming more critical. I’m definitely going to watch the remaining episodes too
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Stein, K., Prondvai, E., Huang, T., Baele, J.-M., Sander, P.M. and Reisz, R. 2019. Structure and evolutionary implications of the earliest (Sinemurian, Early Jurassic) dinosaur eggs and eggshells. Scientific Reports 9 (1): 4424.
I'm kind of surprised by that because I actually noticed fewer issues in the Mesozoic than the Paleozoic.
Didn't they say before that the volcanism lasted for a hundred thousand years, though?
I didn't notice the Pangaea bit, everything felt fine when I did, but clearly you are more informed than me...
I definitely agree on the Lystrosaurus extinction story being unconvincing. We didn't see any of the competition, and while I thought that where so many of land vertebrates were Lystrosaurus, combined with the fact that some baby animals are not so wary, this wasn't as bad as people thought, though I overreacted a bit at the Dodo comparison, before I realized that the narrator did not mean stupid...
Regardless, I consulted Infinity Blade, and he told me that there were relevant intermediate predators here.
Yeah, I thought we were going to see some Icthyosaurs. It would have been a nice surprise, especially when so far, the only prehistoric animals that I didn't see beforehand were the fish hunting Rhizodus, and a close-up of Arkansaurus.
According to the book, the Pliosaur is Pliosaurus itself, and you were right about it being Pterodactylus. On that note, I see that pterosaurs are still eating babies...
I can't comment on the accuracy of Plateosaurus, but yeah, I those Sauropodormorphs feel undertalked about. Especially when they feel like an obvious candidate for a "transitional form" that creationists always ask for.
My only guess on the Triassic extinction is that they already spend so much time on extinctions, and having seen episode 5 already, I can tell you that dinosaurs take up surprisingly little real estate in LOOP. Well, episode 6 is apparently mostly about birds so, Mesozoic dinosaurs, I mean. |
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Post by theropod on Oct 27, 2023 22:12:52 GMT 5
What do you mean by this theropod? Do you mean this could have been JP-ized by Spielberg wanting to take inspiration from his past productions with dinosaurs? Well I actually made this comment specifically with regard to my suggestion that documentaries should learn from past inaccuracies (and thus get better over time). The Jurassic Park franchise in particular is very guilty of not doing the same, and in fact did the exact opposite (the dinosaurs in Jurassic World were in some ways a step back from the ones in the original Jurassic Park). Admittedly Spielberg wasn’t involved in all of them, but he was involved in Jurassic World 1. |
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Post by theropod on Oct 28, 2023 2:28:20 GMT 5
Exalt Didn't they say before that the volcanism lasted for a hundred thousand years, though? I think so, yes. One more example of them saying something in one episode, and then contradicting themselves or ignoring it in the next. Archosauromorphs already existed in the Permian and were faunivorous, though they were rare. Therocephalians and Cynodonts also survived the P/T event. Anyway, there is only one single case of a specialized carnivore descending from a lineage of specialized herbivores (and that is Thylacoleo), so it’s not as if there were no predatory ancestors of Erythrosuchus during the heyday of Lystrosaurus for the latter to get used to. There may well have been less predation pressure overall, sure, and increased predation pressure may well have been the cause of the decline of this genus, but that doesn’t mean Lystrosaurus would have evolved to simply not know what a predator is; low predation pressure does not mean no predation pressure at all. Before the P/T event, Lystrosaurus also coexisted with plenty of big predators, so it’s not as if it was somehow physically incapable of surviving in a world with predators. The "dumb dodo effect" exists, but only in situations where a predator is actually introduced to an ecosystem suddenly. Such sudden appearances of predators doesn’t just happen by way of a predator evolving within an ecosystem. Most of the time, it happens due to humans either introducing themselves, or other predators (e.g. domestic cats or dogs) or omnivores (e.g. rats) to an ecosystem that did not have these predators previously. In some rare cases it may well happen due to natural circumstances, e.g. rafting or other mechanisms of biotic interchange that see a predator suddenly appear somewhere it didn’t exist before. But these are all instances where a predator evolved in one place and then got introduced to another, something that they don’t imply happened (and would be hard to envision happening on Pangea anyway) in LOOP; they just literally make it look as though the Erythrosuchus suddenly appeared out of nowhere, making me, as I said, seriously worried they don’t understand how evolution works, because they apparently felt like they needed to make up a stupid reason for why Lystrosaurus went extinct. I seriously find it hard to forgive that they talk about how awesome marine reptiles where, and then skip right over the period during which the two longest-lived and most diverse groups of mezozoic marine reptiles evolved for no reason at all. Makes me question the sanity of the people who planned this documentary, honestly. I strongly suspected this based on the size and time…makes one wonder why they couldn’t just say that (the genus name "Pliosaurus" is seriously underutilized in documentaries for some reason, I think the only pliosaur whose name we were ever explicitly given in a paleo documentary was Liopleurodon…though it was also based on material that is more likely Pliosaurus than Liopleurodon) Seems to be a trend somehow. Maybe the producers watched Prehistoric Planet (can’t help but think they took some inspiration from it), looked at the Barbaridactylus-eating- Alcione scene, and liked it so much they wanted something similar. Thinking about it, this might just be a coincidence, but even the way the Pterodactylus fly really reminds me a lot of the pterosaurs on PP, though that may just be a coincidence. Yes, exactly the kind of taxa that should feature more heavily in documentaries (without being too on the nose about it, otherwise the creationists will think it is some liberal conspiracy to indoctrinate their children and just try to ban science documentaries alltogether). Considering that, they are hyping them up quite massively. I actually don’t have a problem at all with dinosaurs taking a bit of a back seat for once. Not to undermine dinosaurs in any way, but dinosaurs receive a huge amount of attention pretty much everywhere. Attention that would much more productively been spent on other animals. The problem is, said other animals, as we’ve seen from the four episodes I’ve commented on so far, haven’t really been justice either. We barely see any of the many wonderful non-dinosaurs from the Triassic, for instance; we literally see three Triassic animals; Lystrosaurus, Erythrosuchus and Plateosaurus, and we only see two interacting in a single ecosystem. LOOP’s Triassic literally gives us less biodiversity than WWD’s Triassic, even though LOOP had more time and the benefits of modern science and special effects to do it. Maybe that’s why this episode was such a letdown for me, with the Erythrosuchus being pretty much the only major upside. I’d simply hoped they would flesh out the Triassic a little more compared to previous portrayals (that were already quite lacking), but they did the exact opposite. We literally saw more different Triassic animals in a single short segment of Dinosaur Revolution than we saw in this entire episode of LOOP. Talk about overhyping a series before its release…
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Post by Infinity Blade on Oct 28, 2023 3:03:18 GMT 5
Morgan Freeman bloopers to lighten everyone's day
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